Beyond Kinect: Gestural computer spells keyboard death

This prototype demonstration shows from above how a person could use pinch gestures to operate a smartphone. In actual use, the phone would not need to be held in the other hand, and the shoe sensor would be small enough to fit in a shoe. (Credit: Screen capture by Martin LaMonica/CNET) A group of researchers says shoes may be the next thing in the busy field of wearable computers and gesture interfaces. Computer scientists from the Telekom Innovation Laboratories, the University of Munich, and the University of Toronto this week published a paper on ShoeSense, a wearable computing system for a smartphone. It's one of many gesture interface-related papers being presented this week at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2012) conference, which is sponsored by the research arms of Microsoft, Google, eBay, and other tech companies. What a ShoeSense sensor would look like. (Credit: Telekom Innovation Laboratories) Wearable computing got a high-profile plug when ... [Read more]Related Li